After the Harvest
by Maridee42
Summary: Kate Austen, gen. The world's a long cold empty place nowadays.


After the Harvest

Character: Kate Austen

Setting: after the island

Disclaimer: I don't own Lost.

* * *

The world's a long, cold, empty place nowadays. She doesn't blame Jack; his death, she thinks, was inevitable. And better that than worse. She doesn't blame Sawyer, either, for falling in love with Juliet. Her heart's a malleable thing, and can't be broken.

She doesn't even blame Claire for going crazy (again), or Cassidy for slamming the door in her face (he came here, Kate, how the hell is that not your fault) or Paik for unleashing the police dogs on her (you came back. My daughter did not. Tell me, Miss Austen, how was it that you managed to survive twice?)

Sometimes having a left arm that's good for shit really isn't an acceptable excuse.

She thinks about going through Iowa and touching base with her mother, but she's broken that vow never to return one too many times already. She imagines that it would go something like this:

(Kate) "Hi, mom."

(Diane) "Katharine. What are you doing here?"

(Kate) "I was in the area. Thought I'd drop by."

(Diane) "Why, do you want to reminisce over killing my husband?"

(Kate) "Depends. Would you like me to beat you up for old times' sake?"

Lousy conversation, anyways. So, mostly, she wanders.

* * *

One night she sits on the edge of her balcony with a shot of whiskey and thinks about Sayid. Practical, lovelorn, never-to-be-underestimated Sayid, who died then lived then blew himself up to save them all. Sayid, the hero, who could never go back home.

She'd always been a little bit scared of him. She'd known he had no limits.

She thinks that for him it was easy. When he came back, his heart hadn't come back with him, and so everything had come down to actions instead of consequences.

Somewhere, a church bell tolls. She slips down off the ledge and leaves the drink on the edge. Some vices are better left outside.

* * *

She makes herself a home in Paris. Best forged ID money can buy, says Ben, and he would know. She makes a habit of walking down to the waterfront and the farmer's market to make acquaintances. Her name is Suzanne, she is an expatriate, and she's working to finish her photography degree after divorcing her ex-husband. No one believes Suzanne is her real name.

Years, she murmurs resentfully, and the sympathy smoothes her way.

The truth is that she had been working on her photography degree at a community college, when she hadn't been paying her mother's hospital bills after hospital bills, and that Ben and Hurley's combined magic got her transfer credits. So she finishes quickly and gets a job with a travel magazine, careful to stipulate that she never gets photographed and she never goes to the US.

* * *

Once in a blue moon, she sees ghosts. Hurley's generally good about keeping them on the island. He says that the island was lonely – that it needs people, but can only get them by the most absurd and bizarre of circumstances, and none of them can ever stay.

"I'm the luck dude," Hurley says. "It's why I'm the boss now."

She's unsure about the ability of a hunk of rock in the middle of the ocean to have feelings at all; but by this point, she's learned not to ask questions she doesn't want to know the answers to. Not even when Shannon's on the other side of a roulette table.

She isn't the type to want to go Shannon's way (although it could easily happen). She knows too much about guns, and how they can fail. But there are days when she looks up at tall buildings and wonders if the fall would be worth the leap.

* * *

She meets David in Cairo. He's a sweet, savvy, smartass kid in need of a big sister to look out for him. The boy had gotten lost on a trip around Europe, fallen in with the wrong crowd, and ended up here. She patches him up, travels with him from Casablanca to Nice to Prague, and then leaves with his memorized contact information. He's a good kid, training to be a doctor.

When she began seeing Jack in him, she knew she had to leave. It breaks her heart, or what's left of it. But it doesn't hurt half as much as leaving Aaron with Claire's mother, so she does it.

Besides, it's a good lesson. No one ever stays.

* * *

Surprisingly enough, she does bump into Richard and Miles. Sawyer, she learns, is bumming around Albequerque, trying to sweet talk Cass. More power to him, Miles says, and laughs. They're besotted.

She smiles for them, because someone has to. Send me a postcard if you get married, she says. I'll get you the biggest coffeemaker I can find.

The world's changed. So has she. She speaks a smattering of French, German, Spanish and Arabic that generally serves, and every day she fights to figure out what to do with it. She's homesick for a place that doesn't exist and a man who's been built up in her imagination. She's homesick for a boy who doesn't recognize her anymore and a mother who never chose her. She's homesick for feeling like there's a way out.

* * *

She's homesick for things she can't describe and people she barely knew, and she doesn't know what to do with herself.

When she lands in New York from her last gig, she quits her job and buys a sedan, packing all her things into a backpack. She's going on a roadtrip.

(the wind in her hair and the gas in her tank are the only things that have stayed the same.)

* * *

After all this time, loneliness is still her only persistent lover.


End file.
